Chapter 157: Furry’s Loss
The wheel slammed its flags into the center of the screen, and the arena’s held breath came out sideways.
"CHINA... VERSUS... AUSTRALIA!"
Not America. Not yet. The colosseum made a strange, split sound, half disappointment and half relief, and then the meaning of the pairing landed properly and the sound died altogether.
China had one fighter left.
The monk was finally going to fight.
"Ladies and gentlemen." Julie’s voice had dropped without her deciding it. "For three years, Star Dragon Tianzun has entered this convention and left it undefeated. In all that time, not one broadcast, not one analyst, not one federation on this planet has been able to say what his ability actually is. His opponents lose. That’s the entire file. And tonight, at last... we watch."
In the Australian alcove, Jackson was already shaking his head.
"No. Absolutely not. Furry, sit down. We forfeit."
The small girl in the blanket looked up at him. She had fought twice today. Her arms were wrapped, her cheek was taped, and she was holding a cup of juice somebody had pressed into her hands an hour ago.
"If we forfeit," she said quietly, "the points go to him anyway, don’t they?"
Jackson’s jaw tightened. Because that was the cruelty of it: nine hundred and fifty points sat on this exhausted child, the entire lead of their nation, and a forfeit handed all of it to China without a single punch thrown. The rules did not care that she was tired. The rules only cared who was left.
"Then we lose the lead," Jackson said. "It’s points, sweetheart. It’s just points."
"It’s not just points. It’s Miss Mercury’s points too now. And Reverb’s." Furry set down the juice, pushed the blanket off her narrow shoulders, and stood. Her legs held. Mostly. "Everyone fought all day to get them. I’m not handing them over sitting down."
She was halfway to the gate when Mercury’s voice stopped her.
The captain stood at the alcove entrance, patched, bandaged, released from the medics against at least one doctor’s loud advice. She looked down at her small teammate for a long moment.
"Listen to me," Mercury said. "You will not win this one. I’m not saying that to be cruel. I’m saying it so you understand that walking down there anyway means something different." She stepped aside from the gate. "Go and stand in front of him. That alone puts you in rarer company than every trophy in this building."
Furry nodded once, and went.
They met at the center of a stage rebuilt for the tenth time, the smallest fighter of the tournament and the mystery of the age.
Tianzun looked down at her. His hands were empty, his beads left on the alcove rail, and up close his smile was the same one he’d worn since dawn, calm and bottomless.
"You fought well today," he said.
The colosseum actually murmured. It was the first time most of the world had ever heard his voice.
"Thank you, sir," Furry said, and bowed.
He inclined his head, returning it.
"FIGHT!!"
Furry moved first, because she had to, because waiting on a mystery favors the mystery. Her legs banded grey, kangaroo muscle flooding in for the opening bound, the same launch that had put a hero of Germany through the stage floor this morning.
She made it one step.
Then the fur simply... drained.
Mid-stride, the transformation let go of her, grey bleeding away, muscle unwinding, and she stumbled out of her own charge on ordinary human legs, catching herself on one hand, eyes wide.
’What... no. Come back.’
She reached for the crocodile. The plates began to rise along her arms, touched the air of the stage, and sank away like water into sand. She reached for the mantis shrimp. Her arm banded with color for half a heartbeat, and then the color fled. The falcon would not come to her eyes. The cheetah would not come to her legs.
Every beast she called answered.
And every beast, upon arriving, refused.
It was not her ability failing. She could feel that clearly, horribly. The gift was working exactly as it always had, the door standing wide open, and on the other side of the door her animals stood bristling in the dark, and not one of them would walk through it toward the thing that stood on this stage.
Because they could feel what the crowd could not.
The wolf’s hackles knew. The shark’s lateral line knew. The small burrowing things and the great ocean things and every instinct nature had spent a billion years sharpening for exactly one purpose, the recognition of a predator, all of them looked at the smiling monk in saffron and arrived at the same ancient, wordless answer.
Do not go near that.
Furry stood alone in the middle of the stage, a small girl with no beasts, shaking, and it was not the shaking of injury or exhaustion. It was borrowed terror, flooding back up the open door from every animal she had ever carried, a billion years of instinct screaming through her narrow body at once.
Tianzun had not moved. He had not raised a hand. He watched her with what looked, unbearably, like sympathy.
"...The animals," Julie whispered into her microphone, into two hundred million homes. "Folks, I don’t... her transformations won’t hold. Nothing’s touching her. He hasn’t MOVED. Why won’t her transformations hold?"
[Opalion: what is happening. someone tell me what’s happening]
[Marypaz13: her face. look at her face. she’s not hurt she’s TERRIFIED]
[ThePathOfTheHunt: the beasts won’t come. three years of mystery and the first clue is that ANIMALS REFUSE HIM]
[infinite_shadows_2972: I have goosebumps and I don’t know why. WHY do I have goosebumps]
In the American alcove, Nicholas stood very still at the rail, and the memory rose in him whether he wanted it or not. The thing he had seen for less than a heartbeat behind the monk. The form without beginning or end, the thousand crumbling faces, the rings that bent space around a head too vast to measure.
’They can feel it,’ he thought, cold crawling up his spine in the warm evening air. ’They can’t see it. Nothing can see it and live long enough to say so. But a billion years of instinct doesn’t need eyes.’ His hand closed slowly on the rail. ’Every animal she owns just looked at what’s standing behind him... and told her no.’
Down on the stage, Furry did the bravest thing anyone did in the entire tournament.
She raised her two small human fists, empty of every beast, and charged him anyway.
The colosseum came up off its seats in a single motion, sixty thousand people shouting for a girl running on nothing but heart at the greatest mystery alive, and she crossed the stage and swung, a plain, tired, human punch with her whole spirit behind it.
Tianzun caught it in one open palm, the way a grandfather catches a thrown ball.
He held her small fist gently, and bent down, and said something to her that the microphones did not catch and that Furry would not repeat for years. Whatever it was, the terror flooding up through her open door went quiet, all at once, like a hand laid on a struck bell.
Her shoulders dropped. Her eyes filled.
She stepped back, pressed her fists together the way she had seen the Chinese team do all week, and bowed.
"I yield," she said, clear enough for every microphone this time.
BWOOOOOM.
There was no roar. The horn sounded into something closer to a church, and the applause that finally came was long and warm and strange, sixty thousand people clapping for a surrender as though it were a victory, because in every way that mattered to them, it was.
{VICTORY: TIANZUN. CHINA}
{POINT TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...}
{FURRY: 950 PTS. TIANZUN}
"Nine hundred and fifty points," Julie said into the hush, and did not shout it. "The largest fortune this event has ever seen changes hands without a single blow landed. Tianzun of China now carries one thousand two hundred points, and the overall lead... with his nation’s fate... into the endgame."
Jackson met Furry at the bridge and picked her up, blanket and all, like she weighed nothing, and the Australian section sang her home for the second time that day.
On the emptying stage, Tianzun stood alone a moment longer.
Then he turned, unhurried, and looked across the arena, past the cameras, past sixty thousand murmuring people, directly into the American alcove, at the one man in the building who had seen what the animals felt.
Nicholas met the look and held it.
’One thousand two hundred points,’ he thought. ’Everything the whole world bled for today, gathered onto one man. Exactly the way I’d have planned it.’
The monk’s smile deepened by a degree.
And down on the rail, unnoticed by anyone, Nicholas’ knuckles had gone white